A Southern Renaissance?

A Southern Renaissance?

The COVID-19 pandemic changed more than public health. It also brought the phrase south working into everyday Italian, describing the movement of employed young people back to southern Italy. As companies accepted remote work, tens of thousands of workers who had been based in northern cities such as Milan returned to their hometowns, often to be closer to family and the sea. The reversal matters because the south had been losing young people and skills since the 1800s.

South working and a new confidence

Gianvito Fanelli, a 31-year-old Puglian designer, spent a decade in Milan before returning to Conversano. He values the simplicity of human relationships, the beauty and produce of his region, the vita lenta and the ability to see the sea whenever he wants. He also sees practical signs of change: his former company is preparing branches in Bari and Salerno, which could let employees return home and give local young people work without an 800 km move.

Fanelli connects that optimism with Matera's role as European Capital of Culture, the opening of Apple's Developer Academy in Naples and Puglia's tourism boom. These developments have created confidence, a resource that the south had lacked for a long time. The shift is not a promise that every problem has been solved, but it makes staying or returning feel possible for more people.

A region still doing the hard work

Physical and digital services still lag behind northern Italy. Fanelli bought a car because the transport network around his home is patchy, and professional networking is harder when colleagues and clients are scattered across several towns. South Working, a Sicily-based project founded in 2020, addresses these limits through coworking spaces, networking opportunities and proposals for public policy that support people who choose to live and work in the Mezzogiorno.

Vieste's trabucchi find a new life

On the Gargano promontory, the not-for-profit association La Rinascita dei Trabucchi Storici del Gargano is restoring Puglia's historic trabucchi, the timber fishing structures that stand above the sea. The work protects the skills of the trabuccolanti, the area's elderly master builders, while giving the structures new uses such as traditional fishing demonstrations, olive-oil tastings and yoga sessions.

Association president and engineer Matteo Silvestri sees the trabucchi as the story of entire Vieste families. His grandfather was a fisherman who emigrated to Germany to work in coal mines, and Silvestri hopes that continuing the tradition honours that history. The restored sites are attracting more visitors each year, with numbers increasing by about 10% to 15% annually.

What a trabucco represents

• ✦A working memory of Gargano fishing families and the knowledge of local builders.
• ✦A way to experience the coast through fishing traditions rather than only through beaches.
• ✦A small-scale venue for food tastings, movement classes and encounters with local history.
• ✦An example of restoration that creates visitor interest without erasing the structure's original identity.

Rione Sanità turns heritage into opportunity

Naples' Catacombe di San Gennaro welcomed about 5,000 visitors in 2006 and 160,000 in 2019. The growth is closely connected with La Paranza, a cooperative founded by parish priest Don Antonio Loffredo and made up of young people from the disadvantaged Rione Sanità. In less than two decades, the cooperative restored a series of catacombs and churches and received a European Heritage Award in 2022.

The effect reaches beyond the monuments. A joint 2021 study by the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and the Università Vanvitelli estimated that La Paranza's work injected almost €22 million directly into Rione Sanità in 2018. For more than 60% of visitors, the catacombs were one of the main reasons for visiting Naples. Restaurants, B&Bs and other local businesses followed, while residents gained a stronger sense that the neighbourhood could have a future.

The social value of a restored site

La Paranza's most important result is not only the number of tickets sold. The cooperative has made local heritage useful to the people who live around it, creating jobs, attracting responsible visitors and changing the way residents see a neighbourhood that was once treated as a no-go slum.

Variabile K and Ercolano's next step

The experience of La Paranza has also encouraged new projects. Variabile K is a social enterprise in Ercolano, southeast of Naples, formed in 2022 by six people in their twenties. It has involved hundreds of local residents in turning an abandoned area into a playground, working without a budget and relying on local creativity.

The group also created FestiVark, a social creativity festival held at Villa Campolieto, one of the historic villas along Ercolano's Miglio d'oro, or Golden Mile. Its future plans include working with local schools on urban-renewal projects. Member Ottavia Semerari argues that many people in the Vesuvian area do not yet feel that the heritage around them belongs to them. Variabile K wants to change that relationship so that restoration becomes a shared civic project rather than something imposed from outside.

A different kind of tourism

These projects point towards a southern Italy where visitors are participants in living communities. A restored trabucco, a catacomb cooperative or a neighbourhood festival can make a trip more memorable while directing attention and income to places that conventional itineraries once ignored.